Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles Film Festival Poster

The 2014 Los Angeles Film Festival poster was created by Ed Ruscha. |Image: Courtesy of LAFF

Although he doesn't have a film screening at this year's Los Angeles Film Festival, artist and Chouinard (60) alumnus Ed Ruscha has created a lasting impression for attendees by designing the festival's 20th Anniversary commemorative poster.

The poster is based on his 1962 painting, Large Trademark With Eight Spotlights, which is part of the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. But the work traveled to several international museums for the 2010 retrospective Ed Ruscha: 50 Years of Painting.

Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights (1962) is the first in a series of horizontal canvases whose proportions echoed the wide-screen CinemaScope format introduced by Twentieth Century Fox. He saw the diagonal compositions in these paintings as ”a comic comment on the idea of speed and motion in a picture,” and remarked: ”I am always reminded of those scenes in the movies that I saw as a kid where there would be a train approaching that would suggest people traveling. The train would start at the lower right hand corner and then in two or three seconds it would zoom in and cover the entire area of the screen … The diagonal for me is like the zoom of a train.”

The Los Angeles Film Festival concludes on Thursday (June 19), also marking the last day to purchase the commemorative poster ($25) from the festival's ticket center.

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